SEO 2015, isn’t getting any easier

September 4th, 2015 | SEO

As the time grows many developments has been taken place in the world. In the same way the web has been changed. In the past it was bit easy for anyone to get ranking for their website on search engines. But as the technology is growing and regular updates in search engines are taking place, getting your website and content to rank in the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo is becoming challenging one. To rank the website requires keen understanding of SEO guidelines and lot of work to be done on those guidelines.

SEO landscape is continuously changing and staying on the top of the changes – practically speaking is the key to ranking. Below mentioned are the few challenges that SEO is facing in the year 2015 :-

Amending the keyword strategy – Semantic search overtaking keyword search

In the past keyword research was the foundation of website ranking. Various keywords tools were available for the one and simply one has to find the less competitive keywords and include them to the website in variety of ways. In that way everyone was getting their ranking easily on the search engines. But then there was the release of Google’s Hummingbird update where semantic search overtake the keyword search. So the business owner’s challenge will be to learn new ways of optimizing the content on the website. They must have to focus on the answering questions, particularly for the mobile users, supplementary information like useful content, customer reviews and latest news etc. on their website. There are limits for using the keywords as well on the website.

Modelling on site changes and using promising content

Technology is advancing to the next level one by one and links are getting harder to come by. It is just not that easy to acquire the same number of links in 2015 without a huge budget. After investing huge on the links one may not get the desired results. So it is advisable to use the beneficial and creative content for the user on the website. This is the main reason that the large businesses are relying more on the press releases to get the links for themselves. Mobile friendly design or one can say responsive design with the different resolutions has become a prerequisite for search. What we are noticing is that technical SEO’s are making come back in the field as well and we all know recently Google has hired technical SEO’s itself. Moreover investment in content marketing is also increasing. Building citations can provide demonstrable results and is something easy to get started with.

Optimize Properly for local SEO and get better results

Almost every business has SEO strategy for itself but still it is being under-estimated by the businesses and brands. In other words we can be sure that if you are under-estimating the SEO, you are missing huge influx of wallet. Recently a statistic shows that 48% of the users are using mobiles for the product search. So we are sure that if you are not optimizing the website well enough for the customers, your website’s bounce rate will be more and you would have to suffer a lot.

Not just mobile-friendly but mobile-first

Mobile-friendly is not only the factor to rank the website in Google. Mobile-first is much more important than mobile-friendly or simply having a mobile app because mobile having surpassed the desktop usage by 2014. So this factor is forcing us to think about the mobile-first website. So designing a mobile-friendly and mobile first strategy is becoming a significant challenge for SEO’s this year. Comparing the short and long form content, the long form content is more critical to rank in the search engines. So we can easily say that your main focus should be on your audience’s like what type of content they are accessing most and what kind of activities they are performing?

Focus on relationship building rather than link building

Previously it was just about the acquiring links from different sites. Many businesses found success through business directories, article marketing and link exchanges. Another popular methods of getting the ranking were keywords rich anchor text for internal links and link exchanges. So at that time getting the ranking was like playing the game of “GETTING LINKS” where one has to earn the more links and it will rank in the search engine irrespective of the fact that it is low quality site. But now because of the regular panda and penguin updates (Google Algorithms) low quality sites don’t even exist in ranking. So in our daily life term we can say that “We miss the link building in the same way as we miss our school days, which will never return”.

Give attention to social media, avoid complicated UX and URL

Search your website in different browsers and search engines and make sure that your social media pages like- Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest. If your social media pages will grow, chances of growing website traffic is more. Note, if you have inactive pages and duplicate accounts, everything will harm your ranking, so kill off the ones you are not using. Website auditor also checks the integrity of the site’s URLs and links, such as data-based dynamic URLs that are too long and lacking in SEO-supporting keywords. 404 errors and broken links can also harm your ranking.